Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

(This is in regards to the tongue piercing = brain infection b.s.).

Anyone reading this is welcome to take this letter I just wrote to the Toronto Star and send it to their local papers. Feel free to even take my name off this letter and sign your own, or edit it however you want (well, don't put my name on it if you edit it though). Anyway, here it is:

Almost every newspaper lately, yours included, has been rerunning a story about a brain infection potentially linked to a tongue piercing. This story twists the facts and misrepresents this fluke infection to unfairly blow this risk out of proportion (even the doctors who reported this have problems believing this infection could be related to the piercing).

Body jewelry manufacturers estimate that well over a million tongue piercings have been performed (they know this because tongue piercings are done using a very specific length of jewelry). Let's look at some other risks: One in 250,000 dog owners is killed by their own dog. One in 180 people dies while running. Why have you not brought attention to these issues? The public needs to know that we need to put all the dogs to sleep and set a personal speed limit of two miles per hour!

I'm all for telling people the risks of body piercing -- people should to know what the risks are for all the things they do. That said, misleading people with false risks accomplishes nothing. If you want to focus on a problem with tongue piercing, focus on chipped teeth, as this is very common. More importantly, it's a problem that can actually be solved by the client simply returning to their piercer a month afterwards to get a snug-fitting bar installed. You see -- that just told people a valid risk that they need to worry about, and it even told them how to minimize the risk. It's not hard.

One in 86,000 skydives is fatal. One in a million tongue piercings might lead to a non-fatal infection... and you think that this one in a million risk warrants this article? I can't believe your team is that stupid. If you want to reprint articles like this about pierced people, why don't you just get the lies over with and admit this is about prejudice against a community that doesn't meet your "cultural norms". You can skip the fake risks and just make your headline simple: "Only freaks have tongue piercings. We don't like you freaks."

I hope in the future that your newspaper will desist from such frivolous -- and prejudicially targeted -- fear mongering. If not, I expect to see the headline, "Government to involuntarily commit all mountain climbers" -- after all, mountain climbing kills one in five serious climbers, whereas suicide attempts are only successful one in seventy-one times.

Shannon Larratt
Publisher, BME: Body Modification Ezine
https://www.bmezine.com/

…sorry I'm not writing much here, I'm currently in the process of rewriting all of the FAQs on BME so all my writing energies are being used up. Right now I'm tackling the horribly out of date, extremely limited, and quite possibly irresponsible “home surgery advice faq”, now retitled the “Elective Home Surgery FAQ”.

From the introduction:

Q: Why home surgery?

The "legitimate" medical community has a remarkably limited range of elective procedures that they are able to offer without facing intense scrutiny and potentially sanctions from their peers. As such, there are a myriad of procedures (including atypical implants, transdermal implants, subincisions, silicone injections, castration, and amputation to name only a few) that are unavailable using the Western medical industry.

As such, people are left with a limited number of options including not getting the procedure at all, doing it themselves, seeking the assistance of an "underground" practitioner (possibly medically trained, but more than likely not), or travelling to a doctor in a country where doctors are not as restricted.

Q: What is this FAQ about?

This FAQ is designed to expose readers to some of the issues involved with performing surgical procedures in a non-medical environment with largely untrained practitioners. This document is not intended as a training guide, and in no way does reading a document like this make a person qualified to perform these procedures.

That said, the vast majority of -- and perhaps all -- practitioners serving the body modification community, be they piercers or be they implanters, fall into the category of "home surgeon" in that they are performing what are arguably pseudo-surgical procedures without the support of the medical community. Using the services of these practitioners is still in most cases the safer than doing it yourself, but it is essential to inform yourself as to the issues they are facing so you can better assess whether the risk is worth it.